Joe Mackall

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Editor's Notes - Volume 13, Number 1I don’t remember much about being 12 or 13 years old, but I do recall feeling a little restless, maybe even a tad reckless. Just how those feelings manifested themselves over forty years ago, I’ll leave buried, deep in the hazy cave of a dim memory. Now that we at River Teeth are in year thirteen, we’re feeling a bit restless ourselves, maybe even a tad reckless.Read More

Editor's Notes, Volume 13 Number 2In the third or fourth year of River Teeth’s existence, a former undergraduate English professor of mine submitted an essay to us. As I tore open the envelope, I fantasized about how many nasty ways I could reject this guy.Read More

Editor's Notes, Volume 14 Number 2Are there too many memoirs out there? Are too many being written? Is enough, enough? After all, for the last twenty-five years we’ve read memoirs on every conceivable subject. Some great, some good, some fair, some poor.Read More

Editor's Notes, Volume 16, Number 1We at River Teeth talk a lot about what the journal has meant to us during our first fifteen years. What we’ve discovered doesn’t surprise us now, but it would have fifteen years ago. It’s the people: the people we’ve met, the people we’ve published, the people who came of age as creative nonfiction writers reading River Teeth. It’s all pretty damn humbling, to be sure.Read More

Editor's Notes, Volume 17, Number 1One day last spring my co-editor, Dan Lehman, and I were emailing back and forth--with me in Ohio and Dan in Taiwan--discussing River Teeth and a writer we were excited to be publishing in this issue. And then Dan said something that knocked me flat: “He reminds me of the late Charles Bowden.” I had not known about Chuck’s death until that second, and I still don’t know how I could have missed the news. Chuck Bowden died on August 30, 2014, at the age of sixty-nine. Too damn young. Too damn soon.Read More

Editor's Notes, Volume 18, Number 1At the end of the academic year, when students start to lose it over grade pressure and work load, and I begin to wear down and wonder how much longer I can read thousands of pages of student work, I do what every burned-out writing teacher would do--I read.Read More

Editor's Notes 20.2When my children turned twenty-one, I wrote each of them a letter.... I knew that although my children were still mine and, of course, always would be, they were entering the world as adults; and forevermore I would have to share them with the world in a way that left me excited and proud, but also anxious and wary. This moment in the life of River Teeth feels a bit like that...Read More